Deconstruct & Analyze too powerful?

[Ed Kolis]

It strikes me that nobody ever trades ships because that's just like trading tech, since you're guaranteed to get a tech from analyzing the ship. What if there were an option at game setup to disable the "deconstruct & analyze" button? Or what if the command didn't always work - say, a 10% chance to fail for every tech level the component is above your known tech? Or maybe D&A should give research points toward an advancement but not enough to give a full level... It doesn't seem like such a hard feature to add... any thoughts? Malfador?

[Baron Munchausen]

The solution to this problem is to allow a 'loan' of ships, putting them under your ally's command without changing ownership. Then you aren't giving away your technology by giving your ally some ships.

[Pax]

Also consider the religious+psychic race that neglects many other forms of weaponry until they have allegience converters with a 100% hit rate. After that, why bother with most weapons research? Just grab an enemy ship or three, and D&A them.

[Baron Munchausen]

Isn't this realistic? How do most technologies spread? Someone gets a sample and figures out how to do it for themselves. I think the age of 'intellectual property' has distorted people's view of history. Copying has been the rule, not the odd exception, and has not been regarded as 'immoral' or 'unfair' either. That's a recent thing introduced by obsession with squeezing the Last penny out of patents.

[PvK]

I don't think it's very realistic to be able to duplicate a technology from an alien civilization one month after having one example of it. I think realistically, there would be many more tech levels and prerequisites in the way. You have to be pretty close to the same tech level and technique to really be able to make practical use of someone else's devices in the short term. It would be useful and provide ideas, and even same or lower tech levels could provide what would essentially be some research points, but not, I think, usually, the ability to immediately start building the same thing, unless it was really close to what you were already doing.

PvK

[Lemmy]

well, i suppose that's why you only gain one level per area, and not just get the level you examined, even if it was 10 levels higher than where you are now.